Sound Art / Radio Art

Wouter Jaspers' guide to radio for artists: crystal sets, shortwave, SDR, home-built antennas, the politics of the spectrum, fifteen artistic approaches from Kubisch to Kogawa, exercises and a timeline of radio art 1909-2026.

A generative system set loose on BBC Radio 3: Jasper Marsalis lets a microcomputer photograph and crossfade the radio's spectrum into an ever-shifting chord of 2048 voices, after Pauline Oliveros and Luigi Russolo.

*50 copies limited edition* »presage« is an act of sonic foraging: shortwave radio transmissions and field recordings were collected around Helsinki, then assembled and transformed into two long-form pieces. Collecting radio brings with it a particular uncertainty, as signals may have travelled enormous distances before arriving stripped of their context and misted with static, interference, and the imprint of atmospheric conditions. A field recording is a more certain and geographically secure …

During the years from 1968-70, Fylkingen Records released series of 7 LPs in collaboration with the Swedish Radio, all of which contained material that was presented during the yearly festivals for Text-Sound Composition that Fylkingen arranged during those three years. The yearly festivals continued from 1971-71. A series of records that documented these festivals was planned but, due to economic reasons at that time, they were never made. Fylkingen Records has now, over 40 years later, found t…

Tip! *In process of stocking* "Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced “a pause for the cause”, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent …

Interstitial Spaces marks Martin Brandlmayr’s first venture with Faitiche and explores those rarefied, nearly invisible moments at the threshold of musical narrative—what lingers after conclusion, what bristles before commencement. Here, Brandlmayr—Radian and Polwechsel's celebrated percussion mind—deploys field, film and record scraps, sculpting from absence a delicate, audio micro-drama.

Ars Acustica is a group of producers and editors of radio art programs in national-public broadcasting corporations in Europe. Founded in 1989 within the European Broadcasting Union EBU, the Ars Acustica group aims at initiating and realising projects, promoting radio art, exchanging productions between European radios, and eventually open up a space for debate on the future of radio, of art and of radio art as such.Recent Ars Acustica projects include the annual Art’s Birthday celebration on 17…

The album, featuring Milan Knížák, Petr Ferenc and Opening Performance Orchestra, includes Knížák's 1973 private recording Broken Music, released as a multiple of forty copies by Armin Hundertmark in 1983 on Edition Hundertmark, and a live version of Broken Rebroken, performed in January 2020 at the Museum of Czech Music in Prague by Milan Knížák, Petr Ferenc (aka Phaerentz) and Opening Performance Orchestra. The album comes with a comprehensive booklet that includes an interview with Milan Kníž…

Hanne Darboven, a visual artist known primarily for her rigourous, repetitive drawings which are drawings of non-representational writing, loops written out again and again in time, also created music, including Opus 17A, a work for double bass. This piece will then be recorded and played once a day throughout the duration of the exhibition. This monumental piece consists of 1008 pages of uniform size divided into 4 Opus’s (Opus 17a and b and Opus 18a and b). Each Opus is comprised of 36 poems, …

Alessandro Bosetti, Milan-born, Marseille-based sound artist and composer, paints a series of portraits from a collection of conversations recorded in Italy over the course of a Summer. Bosetti chose and collected four voices articulated over three generations, two female and two male. He then disassembled them and put them together in a palimpsest that integrates three elements: a polyphonic writing – collage of thousands of fragments and vocal writing for a portraitist – an electroacoustic wri…

** Expanded and revised edition, published on the occasion of the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition 2019-2020 ** "Keeping the rebellious nature of its wicked subject intact, Sense Sound Sound Sense nevertheless provides an impeccably researched, crystal-clear narrative of Fluxus's true revolutionary spirit." The Wire)Truly necessary catalogue accompanying an extensive exhibition dedicated to art works and musical scores and their relationship with Fluxus, an interdisciplinary movement of internatio…

Six radio texts by Ferdinand Kriwet in a beautifully designed 3 LP Picture Discs Luxury Box. Ferdinand Kriwet (born in Duesseldorf in 1942) is a multimedia artist and poet who has produced many seminal films and sound works for radio and television, in particular throughout the 1960's and 1970's. His works 'Apollo Amerika' 1969 and 'Campaign' 1973, rank today as outstanding artistic documents of these spectacular events in the history of mankind. Kriwet created the work 'Apollo Amerika' whilst i…

"This small archive is a glimpse of a body of work made between 2014-2023 for, on, or with radio. I’ve been fascinated by broadcast radio since the earliest stages of working as a musician. I’m grateful to have been given many opportunities to make radio shows in a variety of diQerent contexts, and over the years have produced hours of work for the medium. Most of this has happened in London, with UK-based collaborators.  There is of course a real beauty in the ephemerality of the broadcast - it…

Super limited edition by the legendary ClausBöhmler. Since the late 60s he has remained faithful to radical experiments with visuals and sound material from the cultural everyday; generating drawings, texts, radio-based sound works, artist’s books and video clips in tumblr. mode. He has become the champion of a low-tech, but high-end analysis of language, technology, and entertainment.Claus Böhmler (1939-2017) was a Fluxus artist from Hamburg. In the mid-1960s Böhmler was one of Joseph Beuys’s s…

** 20 copies only ** Mono Radius is the first collection in a series of recordings which looked at the retrieval and manipulation of radio frequency guard bands and half duplex crosstalk interference. Pulled from late night radio scanning and various local analogue signals, all recorded artifacts were then processed manually through a VCR, via the audio/control head. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi pnl(a) is Brandon Auger. Brandon Auger (b.1978) is an artist, improviser and structural builder based …

*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…

Tip!  Back in the early '90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced "a pause for the cause", I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That's something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing t…

Edition of 100. Magneto Mori is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage. In this iteration the location is the Irish mountain town of Kilfinane. Using a portable reel to reel tape recorder sounds from around the town were recorded onto the first side of the tape over a two day period – dripping rain, creaky gates, car mechanics, drainpipes, shops, church bells, refrigerator cabinets, wind blowing through the trees, passing traffic, etc. were just some of the sounds encounter…

As source of sound Ferran Fages used radio receivers exclusively. It may seem that using various unconventional devices, often extremely amplified and processed, has become a staple of contemporary experimental music language."*Pèl Nord*", however, seems very fresh and certainly makes a new, intriguing chapter in the career of this composer. The dynamics of the record doesn't rely on a traditional patter of a quiet start, increasing drone and reverberating finale. Unhurriedly, it accustoms the l…

* Edition of 300, hand-humbered + Obi * I've Had It up to Hear with Fish & Chips by Ben Ellul-Knight and Tom White is a hörspiel about 'care work' of all kinds. In part it is auto-ethnographic, as it draws on Ben's experience working as a play worker, social worker and as a volunteer with refugee and asylum-seeker support services. More personal reflections are mixed with conversations Ben had with support workers, social workers, play workers and mental health nurses to form a script. Different…

Faitiche presents, for the first time on vinyl, a selection from the 84-track (!!) remix project originally released in 2013 as a three-tape set by Trip Shrubb aka kptmichigan aka Michael Beckett. Known to many from bands like Tuesday Weld or The Schneider TM Experience, Beckett remixed his way through Harry Smith’s famous Anthology of American Folk Music – a compilation of American folk, blues and country recordings released in 1952, soon to become key point of reference for the emerging folk r…

Faitiche releases an album version of the radio piece Vom Rohen und Gekochten (The Raw and The Cooked) originally composed and produced by Jan Jelinek for the state broadcaster SWR2. The album The Raw and The Cooked brings together five sound collages that deal with the consistency of material and its mutability.  Solid, raw, boiling, powdery, liquid, broken and folded - categories which describe the nature of material. They can also be read in a chronological sequence: solid becomes broken beco…

Edition of 300 copies. Comes with 16 page booklet. First release of Gerhard Rühm's Radio-Play 'Masoch'. A ritual recitation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Ignatius von Loyola for one female and one male speaker, a chorus of speakers, and tape. "When the sexual pathologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term »masochism« in 1890, he was referring to the preferred literary topic and the lived obsessions of the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. With the help of biographical highlight…

**250 copies** The connection with and love for Radio Centraal runs through Ultra Eczema’s veins. The Antwerp-based station has functioned as a voice for myriad local underground movements for nearly forty years. From its inception, architect and ex-Situationist Rudi Renson and restaurateur Roland Rom were a critical, hilarious, and provocative voice in its repertoire of weirdos, chiefly via the weekly RTVS (Radio & Television Salon) programme.Lots of 'music' was made within this show, largely e…

**50 copies** In hardbound embossed special package (like previous edition in this series), numbered & signed, with an original work by Hartmut Geerken. DVD with the recording of the radio-play from November 1994

Limited edition of 300 copies, vinyl only. Dan Lander (Oshawa, Ontario, 1953) studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (Nova Scotia) with a focus on performance, video and sound. After leaving school he set up a modest recording studio in his apartment and developed a method of composition which sprang from his interest in phonography and the referential in recorded sound. This interest also led to his involvement as an editor of two anthologies: Sound by Artists (1990…

Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. Larry Wendt is an extraordinary but very little known pioneer of live computer electronics and text-sound, while Nicolas Collins is here with the legendary 'Devil Music'. Devil’s Music is a performance piece about global media, local culture and individual interference. It developed in 1985 out of the confluence of Collin's fascination with early Hip Hop DJs, a Cagean love of the splendor of radio, the introduction of the first affordable, portab…

Buh Records present Grabar y Coagular: A History of Audio Pieces By Peruvian Artists (1972-2018), the first collection that explores the relationship between recording art and conceptual pieces. With a range that goes from experimentation in sound poetry to radio art, eccentric compositions that evoke the Fluxus's spirit, appropriationism, and more. In Peru, the visual arts and sound creation have, in the last years, taken a common path: visual artists have begun to produce sound creations, expe…

Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of the only known recordings from the infamous occultist, mystic, magician, poet, novelist, sexual deviant, and all-around misfit, Aleister Crowley. Recorded onto wax cylinder in the early 1910s, and later transferred to 78 RPM discs. The tracks include Crowley's recitation of the first two Enochian Keys, original poetry, incantations, and songs. An absolutely essential piece of occult history. This collection was originally compiled and released on LP in…

Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Pur En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu by Antonin Artaud. Antonin Artaud was a French poet, dramatist, and director and one of the most important figures in 20th century European theater, and especially the avant-garde. His piece "Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu" was recorded in 1947 to be aired on French radio. But the project was shelved not only for its scatological, anti-American, anti-religious content, but also for its avant-garde sound, wi…

Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. This anthology of Canadian and Swedish soundpoetry is a numbered editon of 300 copies. Packed in a paperboard case with attached 4-page booklet (side 4 is glued to the box). It features contribution by legendary artists such as Four Horsemen (sound poetry group of Canadian poets composed of bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery) Susan Frykberg, Paul Dutton as well as Lars Gunnar Bodin, Arne Mellnäs and many more

In the archive of the Janacek memorial in Brno, lies a somehow odd treasure: a series of very tiny notebooks where composer Leoš Janáček used to annotate scraps of spoken language he would hear during his daily life in musical notation. Each one of those speech-melodies, as we call them today, taken roughly from 1904 till 1928, is a small sound photograph of a mundane and ephemeral situation, a fragment that let us blink into an acoustic reality long gone. Janacek practice and obsession re…

The piece “Radio-Imitat (Radio Imitation)” by the German artists and musicians collective Insitut fuer Feinmotorik was produced in 2009 for the monthly radio show “Radio Arthur” on Radio LoRa. In addition to its reconstruction of advertising, music and jingles, imaginative room is also made available for talk and discussion. A facsimile of radio is thus painstakingly manufactured, as if by someone who for cared very much less for sense and signification than they did for the weird flow of sound …

Leo Okagawa is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Japan.  For this album Leo Okagawa uses field recordings from various metro stations during the quarantine period & sounds by radio stations.

A beautiful example of restrained electronic improvisation by the established duo of Jamie Drouin (suitcase modular & portable radio) and Lance Austin Olsen (amplified objects and audio cassettes). Recorded in Victoria, West Canada, in 2012 shortly before Jamie Drouin moved to Berlin, the duo revisited the material early in 2014 and reduced it to a set of 'independent, small assemblages' spread across periods of silence, producing a music that is set well aside from conventional ideas of …

First recording of Michel Roth's Im Bau, fifteen sound spaces after Kafka for mezzo-soprano, ensemble and live electronics, in its radiophonic version, with Anne-May Krüger and ensemble æquatuor, recorded in Basel in 2017.

"Tullius Rooms" for piano, electronics and ambient recordings, 19999/2000

Four collaborative works (1997-2011) by Australian sound artist Ros Bandt and German composer Johannes S. Sistermanns, including radio pieces for ABC and a simultaneous Melbourne-Frankfurt performance. Released 2012.